


where death doesn't touch

by dmasiv



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-13
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-12 23:00:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29392341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dmasiv/pseuds/dmasiv
Summary: The four of them made it inside the wall in one piece. Or maybe several pieces barely held together. But still, one piece.Or, what if: Warrior Quartet.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 6





	where death doesn't touch

**Author's Note:**

> there are 2 chapters left to the series but the entire plot of this AU is pretty much complete based on my take of some less popular theories on reddit, so if it ends up being inconsistent w/ how PATHS and the founder's power and all the mumbojumbo yet to be revealed, then, well...
> 
> major changes include:  
> \- warrior quartet  
> \- erwin living past the serumbowl (i hope you understand what this implies)  
> \- due to the course this AU will take into, there will be........ much less main casts dying  
> \- the all important question of Shipping(TM); while its not the main focus, as a warning, there will be elements of yumi/hisu and eru/ri

“Getting cold feet, Reiner?”

“The heck are you talking about?”

He looks up, just so he won’t have to see the way Ymir is peering at him like he’s the smallest thing in the room.

Up above, there’s Paradis’ sky. It domes Paradis Island in a slight orange hue that they’ve never quite seen before, and it overruns Reiner with an undiluted mix of novelty and innocence.

“Reiner?” Bertolt calls out to him. There’s a noticeable tremor along his voice.

“It’s - no worries. It’s the sky. I can’t really put it, but the sky here’s kind of…”

He leaves the sentence unfinished, hoping that any of them would be the wiser. Bertolt pales at him, or at their predicament, or at everything that scapes them. Annie’s kicking pebbles. Ymir eyes the distance that stretches before them, deems it worth quadruple of Reiner’s. 

Getting no response, Reiner picks himself up. “The sky, it reminds me of a newborn.”

“What… does that make us, then?”

At Bertolt’s rupturing question, Annie punts a pebble to a record-high distance.

What does that make them?

“We are - Warriors, we are Warriors,” Reiner repeats in conviction, and third time’s the charm, he believes, as he repeats, the absolute surest, “we are Warriors, we’re here on - on a mission, to punish the devils in this island, and - ”

“And kill babies.” In Ymir’s hand is a pocket knife. In Ymir’s face, there’s an unparalleled look of someone who looks like they’re a platform away from the gallows. In her voice, there’s an _I’ll be doing the whole baby-killing in your place_. “Ready?”

Annie readies her ring. The sharp edge makes a dull gleam in affirmation. 

And it feels as if the sky is closing in on them, welcoming their stay. That’s when they know there’s no turning back.

“Better not crap your pants, Reiney-boy.”

“Ymir,” Bertolt chides her. On another day, he’d look more amused.

“Don’t want the people in there to notice the shit stains on your armor.”

“Shut the hell up.”

What comes next are: droplets of blood, a lightning strike, the scrambling noises of three children mounting the Female Titan. Then a cry, and everything else is a blur as the Female Titan runs for its life with pure titans hot on its trail a fair distance away. Bertolt sounds frantic in his prayer to a nonexistent god; alarmingly enough, Ymir’s broken into laughters; he can’t deduce how Annie is faring deep in the confine of the nape, but Annie speaks in act, and the Female Titan is sprinting with a desperation untapped to Reiner; and Reiner mulls -

And Reiner doesn’t mull. A Warrior is defined by their mission. Mulling took no place in every of the guidebooks, the lectures, and the training regime that molded him into the Warrior he is today. 

He tries to laugh but no sound comes out. Ymir has stolen it all from him.  
  


* * *

  
Ymir has stopped laughing, but only because she’s preoccupied with three child soldiers strung along her mane and a whole legion of pure titans each making a beeline towards them from afar.

“The wall!” is less an announcement and more of a desperate attempt to comfort themselves more than anything else. The slight relief across Bertolt and Annie’s face don’t go unnoticed.

Warrior or not, they can’t deny the other halves of themselves: children.

It’s something a pep-talk about how the future of the Marley rests on their valiant (and tiny, and brittle) shoulders could not quite dispel.

“Bertolt…” Distorted voice ruptures its way out of the Jaw Titan’s metallic hardened skin encasing the lower half of its face. It offers an open palm for Bertolt to hop onto.

And Bertolt is just a boy with teeth in a tight grit and eyes a hue of red. Bertolt is just a boy when he jumps onto the Jaw Titan’s palm. Bertolt is just a boy when he’s almost knocked off-balance by his own uneven footing, and most of all, Bertolt is just a boy when the Jaw Titan lowers him onto the ground for it is his time to set the next part of the plan into motion.

Annie is just a girl when the fear and anxiety sap her face even less of color, when her grip onto a fistful of the Jaw Titan’s hair tightened.

Reiner is just a boy when he watches as Bertolt, a boy - the Colossus Titan, manned by a boy - towers over the towering wall. Reiner is just a boy when the Colossus Titan busted a hole onto the southern gate of the Shiganshina district with a single kick which he practiced for days. 

He thinks, maybe, of the three, Ymir is the one who isn’t quite a girl, as the Jaw Titan scales the wall with an almost mechanical ease. 

“Bertolt! Bertolt!”

They reach the top of the wall in no time. Reiner calls out for Bertolt, who’s running in his largest steps, away from the steam curtaining the Colossus Titan’s stationed body. Away from the approaching tall titan with a smile they will see when they close their eyes for the next few weeks.

When Bertolt takes Annie’s outstretched hand, Reiner takes it as his cue to, “Ymir - Ymir, _please,_ there’s a - !”

“It’s ignoring us,” Annie’s eyes are trained on the pure titan, which spares them no glance, “why?”

“Who cares?! _Ymir!_ ” 

As the Jaw Titan makes a dash along the wall, running for a place to launch Reiner some spot near the northern gate that they have to bust next, Reiner feels anxiously tall as he watches over the district at its thirteenth hour doom. Peering from above the way a scavenger does as the mindless titans file into the district in eerie frolic.

Bertolt is the first of them to tear his eyes off the view. Then him, and lastly, Annie.

Because, Warriors or not, they can’t deny that Annie is just a girl, that he and Bertolt are just boys -

“ _You good here?_ ” The Jaw Titan speaks in a voice Reiner will never get used to.

“Yeah… yeah. I’ll just… have to land on my feet. Yeah.”

“ _No getting cold feet…_ ”

“I know!”

“ _In five._ ”

And maybe, at least, Ymir isn’t quite just a girl as much as she’s a dead girl walking. At least one of them will sleep well tonight.  
  


* * *

  
As the Armored Titan readies itself to charge at the northern wall of the Shiganshina District, Reiner makes the grave mistake of hanging his head low. It takes everything in his willpower to unlatch his eyes off the chaos around him. It’s mind-numbingly hard to imagine them as demons when they look like you, when he carries in his fist Bertolt and Annie, who look just like them.

The view was miles better atop the wall. There, the Paradis people looked closer to ants instead of a lifeform a tad too similar to them. 

His crash landing had robbed the lives of some, flattened by the insurmountable weight of the Armored Titan, or the mercy kill of getting blown meters away onto a building instead. Seeing the results of his handiwork up close makes him choke on something nauseating. 

Feeling wrung out, he resorts to his mantra: Warriors don’t mull. He’s running thin on time as he could feel, from the tremor along the ground, that the pure titans in the vicinity are making his mark on him in large, carefree jogs. 

He makes the Armored Titan take measured steps back for the charge.

The steps start to rumble louder. They are getting closer.

_Crap, I gotta, I gotta -_

When he feels a blob of mass attaching itself onto his back, he realizes how he has fucked up.

Another mass piles on him and another, each forcing its set of teeth along the hardened skin of the Armored Titan. He elbows one, knees another, throws one over the shoulder - but another five pile onto him. It keeps on increasing in numbers until Reiner realizes that _he’s got done in._

_Oh crap oh crap oh crap - someone, someone please -_

There’s the loud sound of something tearing into the flesh. Reiner doesn’t feel any pain, so it’s not his. The blood that splatters onto his armor, the crevices between, and splotches that get onto his eyes aren’t his.

The pure titans around him have seemingly given up in trying to crack himself open - instead, something else entirely has gotten them invested. 

Reiner watches as the Jaw Titan takes to the center stage of the district with not only a sizable following of pure titans behind it, but also people - the soldiers - swinging around with their wires-like mechanism and blades drawn maiming at it.

_Ymir!_

The Jaw Titan holds up a fist for a split second -

before launching itself dead-on to the very tall titan that had ignored them on the outer wall. 

Should I… should I help her?

The gate is a part of the mission, but can they afford risking an ally when there’s no sign of the Founding Titan activating its power?

Warriors don’t think. Warriors don’t make decisions.

The Armored Titan’s fist pummels a 3-meters pure titan with only half the will. Reiner watches as he forms a decision.

The Jaw Titan grabs a hold of a smaller pure titan’s leg with both its arms and swings it onto the grinning titan, toppling it off balance before it could feed itself with the woman it plucked out of a pile of rubbles. The grinning titan topples off-balance, sags onto the ground below, crushing under her the smaller titans that were on Jaw Titan’s tails just before along with the ground soldiers as the collateral damage.

But it’s a fight between Ymir and a swarm of every other thing that’s after her. A squad of more soldiers launch their wires on her, and - 

The Jaw Titan raises its fist a second time, signalling the other three to go on with the plan - wreck havoc, then blend into the evacuating masses. Reiner gets Ymir’s message in proverbial emboldened letters: _hurry the fuck up, you sack of good-for-nothing bottom-scraper!_

Reiner tries to look for its eyes. _Don’t die._

A soldier manages a deep cut along the Jaw Titan’s eyes. It blindly hops onto another building and raises a fist for the third time as a desperate signal before some more wires etch themselves deep on her sides, and blurs of brown and green zoom past it, leaving cuts and gashes along the Jaw Titan's arms and torso.

Reiner throws the entirety of the Armored Titan’s weight onto the northern Shiganshina District gate.  
  


* * *

  
When Reiner opens his eyes, there’s a tall ceiling above his head and a cloth under where his body lies.

He sits upright, finding Bertolt and Annie cross-legged right beside him.

“Don’t rush it, Reiner.”

“It’s, I’m alright.” He says to the aghast look on Bertolt’s face. “We’re here, huh.”

“Yeah… yeah.”

“Ymir? Ymir?! Did she - ”

“I am.”

Reiner throws his head over to his left. There’s Ymir in one piece.

“Ymir - ”

“I am. Unfortunately.” She lunges weakly at his thigh. “You owe me a… five, ten favors.”

“Shut the _hell_ up…”

They made it. Failure in luring the Founding Titan out aside, for one, the four of them made it. He considers it a small victory.

They look awful. Bertolt’s a nervous wreck, even more so than usual. Annie looks like she’s just going to swim home in three days. They never know whether Ymir actually wants to live or not. And Reiner has definitely seen better days. 

The ceiling above them scrapes tall, the sky has been stripped off its adolescence, and they have zero idea what to do from there on. But the four of them made it. 

He considers it a small victory. 

**Author's Note:**

> feedbacks much appreciated!


End file.
